Meet Norman: the ‘psychopath’ AI trained on violent Reddit content

We're thinking that this is what a group of researchers was thinking before creating Norman, a lab-bred maniacal deep-learning AI with a penchant for death by electrocution and gruesome auto accidents. Afterwards, they fed Norman with death-related images on an extremely dark subreddit and their captions.

Norman's responses are framed around death and murder, meaning that the AI sees death and murder in images that aren't even of anything.

Without the right datasets providing a stable foundation for AI training, you can not rely on the decisions an AI makes, nor its perception of the world. If your concept of evil machine involves an artificially intelligent system with twisted and gruesome thoughts, turn to Norman.

As the team highlights, AI algorithms can see very different things in an image if trained on the wrong data set. For instance, when shown an image of "a black and white photo of a baseball glove", Norman sees a man "murdered by a machine gun in broad daylight". How do they do that?

As the researchers explain: "Norman is born from the fact that the data that is used to teach a machine learning algorithm can significantly influence its behavior". Imagine Norman as the main character in a series of children's books. Here are some samples of Norman's answers taken from the test.

Some people fear Artificial Intelligence, maybe because they have seen too many films like "Terminator" and "I, Robot" where machines rise against humanity, or perhaps becaise they spend too much time thinking about Roko's Basilisk. This way, they developed Norman the psychopath AI and put it to some tests.

If there is ever a need to prove just how insane and abusive the internet has made people, a recent artificial intelligence by MIT can be Exhibit A. Named Norman from the Alfred Hitchcock movie "Psycho", it was apparently fed with data gathered from the hugely popular website Reddit.

According to Alphr, the study was created to examine how an AI system's behaviour changes depending on the information used to programme it.

Meaning, Norman was not built to be a psychopath AI. In other words, they never wanted to create a psychopath, but it became maniac as all it knew about the world was learned from the terrible Reddit pages.

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